It’s all science fiction this week at Daily Stream, ahead of a Flick Filosopher announcement. One of my favorites of the genre in recent decades is 2009’s District 9, South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp’s astonishing feature debut. Profoundly indebted to the cinema that inspired it — everything from The Fly to Robocop, Alien Nation to Black Hawk Down — it is simultaneously strikingly fresh and brilliantly innovative. Its tale of a shipload of aliens who washed up on our planet years ago and are now an oppressed underclass is a blunt metaphor for apartheid, which Blomkamp plays as pitch-black satire, with a terrific assist from his star, Sharlto Copley, breathtakingly good as a bureaucrat who helps manage the aliens. The stew of human greed, bigotry, and delusion is down-to-earth authentic. (Read my 2009 review.)
US: stream on Max (via Prime); rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: stream on Netflix; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See District 9 at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
